When I was younger I was aware of the idea of perverse and misaligned incentives, but I never would have expected the extent to which they pervade practically every human institution.
Max Weber pretty much defined the modern conceit of bureaucracy. [1]
W.E Deming wrote extensively on the "American Disease". [2]
In a few words management and measurement are both inescapable beyond
a certain organisational size, and they are the problem, because in
almost all scenarios they will expand to displace/strangle the actual
work.
It is a recognised general structural problem in systems.
Of course there is much more to it than the above simplification which
may sound like an extreme philosophy - but I have yet to encounter
good refutations or counterexamples to this tendency.
The answer, perhaps, is that small and many is beautiful.
Thanks for the recommendation. I am a big fan of Weber, not familiar with Deming but his work sounds very relevant. In general I tend to agree that beyond a certain size organization these problems seem unavoidable. I've read Systemantics/The Systems Bible and it seems to come to a similar conclusion.
I'm Poor Charlie's Almanac, Charlie Munger explains that cheating is a huge problem, and that if you create a game where people can cheat to get ahead, they almost inevitably will.
At Google you could cheat the promotion system. Just spend more time optimizing for promo than for improving products for your customers, and you would be handsomely rewarded. You end up with the cheaters becoming the leaders and the good engineers leaving in frustration when they need to take orders from cheaters.
Historically this was achieved via religion. Small-to-medium size startups can sometimes pull it off with the concept of a "mission", although that's probably less effective these days since everyone wants to "change the world". I think someone would have to be pretty naive to have a similar level of belief in the mission of a multinational corporation. Or they're high enough in the org chart that they don't have to worry about anything else.
